After all, a cargo cult shop is imitating what they have seen about agile. However, like waterfall proponents, cargo cult agile shops are led by people who have looked at pictures of agile models, "read" agile books, or "learned" agile development from PowerPoint presentations. Perhaps there are a number of developers who know agile, but they may not be able to move the company towards agility in the face of generations of managers and developers who have been indoctrinated by DoD-2167.

Once the tasks are prioritized and in the bullseye, you can organize, arrange and add structure. You can start to see relationships, which may indicate a different priority. You can start to see categories, which may affect iteration planning. You can begin to add structure. The outcome of this exercise is an easily understood diagram showing the project’s priorities. For teams that aren’t comfortable assigning a number to a task, this is a good alternative to try.

Using Evidence-Based Scheduling is pretty easy: it will take you a day or two at the beginning of every iteration to produce detailed estimates, and it’ll take a few seconds every day to record when you start working on a new task on a timesheet. The benefits, though, are huge: realistic schedules.

Realistic schedules are the key to creating good software. It forces you to do the best features first and allows you to make the right decisions about what to build. Which makes your product better, your boss happier, delights your customers, and—best of all—lets you go home at five o’clock.